Peter Gudmundsson, as a Marine artillery lieutenant with Korean children during Operation Team Spirit in 1987, says hiring veterans makes good business sense.

Peter Gudmundsson wants to tamp down the idea that hiring veterans is your patriotic duty.

The 50-year-old CEO of RecruitMilitary believes that tapping this growing pool of skilled, disciplined and hardworking workers is simply good business sense.

“Most organizations that want to help veterans get jobs focus on guilt and entitlement,” says Gudmundsson, a U.S. Marine veteran. “Our focus is squarely on the employer and demand side: ‘Companies, here’s what you need. Let us help you find it.’”

On Thursday, RecruitMilitary is holding a career fair at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center, where 72 employers — including Texas Instruments Inc., USAA, Bell Helicopter Textron, The Home Depot and the Texas Highway Patrol — will meet nearly 800 veterans from every branch of service.

The event is free and exclusive to veterans and their spouses, who can register online or just show up at the Gaylord. RecruitMilitary makes its money by getting employers to participate at the 67 job fairs it will hold around the country this year.

Joe Applewhite, senior corporal and recruiter for the Texas Highway Patrol, hopes to fill some of his agency’s 300 vacancies, mostly for state trooper trainees. They are paid $3,100 a month during 21 to 26 weeks of learning the ropes.

“They fit the mold that we’re looking for,” Applewhite says. For starters, they know how to deal with rank and structure. And they’ve already been through rigorous training, so they’re more likely to succeed at the highway patrol academy.

“We are concerned that there are a large number of unemployed returning vets,” Applewhite says. “But our goal is to hire people who meet our standards. These are certainly not sympathetic hires.”

One in 4 new hires at USAA is a veteran or military spouse, says Nathan McKinley, a vice president at the San Antonio-based insurance and financial services company. It wants to increase that to about 1 in 3.

CEO’s journey

Gudmundsson, who moved to Dallas in 1996, has a business past that includes build-ups, startups, meltdowns and transformations. He has held top positions at Primedia Workplace Learning (formerly Westcott Communications), Design Guide Publishing, Jobs.com and more recently, Beckett Media.

The naturalized citizen joined the Marines as a field artillery and intelligence officer after graduating from Brown University in 1985.

“I knew I had the rest of my life to wear a suit,” Gudmundsson says over coffee recently. “So I figured I’d wear some camouflage for a few years and see the world.”

He spent most of the next three years aboard a Navy amphibious warship, but happily, the closest he got to combat was a coup in Fiji.

After active duty, Gudmundsson went to Harvard Business School for his MBA and headed to Wall Street, where he landed a job with Morgan Stanley.

“They loved my background. Marine artillery with Brown and HBS degrees is fairly unique,” he says. “I was able to say I dealt with people and numbers under pressure. That’s an abstraction that investment bankers understood.”

It’s the kind of translation he and RecruitMilitary try to make for veterans today.

An employer may not see how the skills of machine gunner work for miners, welders or rig operators.

“That machine gunner could say: ‘I dealt with equipment. I supervised a team. I took care of myself and overcame adversity,’” Gudmundsson says. “That sounds like a pretty good employee in almost any situation.

“And veterans are hearty. They’re not afraid to move to a small town in Mexico to work in a mine or North Dakota to work in the oil fields. So it’s a logical fit.”

Buying in

In April, Gudmundsson and an investment group bought Cincinnati-based RecruitMilitary with the idea of ramping up the 15-year-old firm into a nationwide military recruiting powerhouse.

Will Thorndike, managing director of Housatonic Partners in Boston, decided to invest with Gudmundsson because: “He’s a proven leader and manager who also happens to have a highly relevant military background. He has very high energy and integrity and a long record of building companies in related markets. I also enjoy his company.”

RecruitMilitary maintains its headquarters in Ohio and has a Dallas office of three staffers and growing. Gudmundsson splits his time between Cincinnati and Dallas when he’s not elsewhere on the road. He says the company is profitable, with about $9 million in revenue expected for 2013. About half of that is from employers participating in its job fairs, including three here this year.

Companies also pay RecruitMilitary to access its database of 640,000 veteran candidates and to list their vacancies on its job board, which currently has 533,000 postings.

“If a company wants to recruit people who know something about underwater demolition who live within 100 miles of Shreveport, we can do that kind of target email campaign,” he says.

Texas puts more resources into veteran hiring initiatives than any other state because it’s politically attractive, Gudmundsson says.

“There’s a lot of victimology gushing out there. It’s well-intentioned but harmful. It raises the question: ‘If they’re so great, why do we have to make all these accommodations?’ My point is: You really don’t.”

Bill Edmundson, strategic recruiting consultant for First Command Financial Services Inc. in Fort Worth, says the big difference between RecruitMilitary job fairs and those put on by government and nonprofit groups is the company’s ability to get veteran candidates to show up.

“My history with folks like the Workforce Commission is that they cast a much wider net, including many people without military experience,” Edmundson says. “We stay with those who can put us in front of as many veterans as possible, and RecruitMilitary is top-notch at doing that for me.”

Texas Instruments has worked with RecruitMilitary for 10 years, says Shannon Freeze-Flory, worldwide recruiting leader. TI will attend eight job fairs next year in addition to Thursday’s event as it tries to recruit veterans for more than 300 openings, including skilled technician and engineering jobs.

“We’ve found that the military offers the discipline and training that produces motivated, successful employees,” Freeze-Flory says. “Job fairs are a great way to connect qualified vets with our talent needs.”

USAA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Hiring Our Heroes studied several hundred metro areas and found that Dallas (including Plano and Irving) ranked second-most-promising in the country for veterans looking for jobs that fit their military experience, higher education opportunities and post-military services.